Field
The present disclosure generally relates to a chip package that accommodates semiconductor chips. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a hybrid-integrated chip package that includes a substrate with adjacent payload and photonic chips, and which has one or more high-speed optical serial data interfaces.
Related Art
As integrated-circuit (IC) technology continues to scale to smaller critical dimensions, it is increasingly difficult for existing interconnection technologies to provide suitable communication characteristics, such as: high bandwidth, low power, reliability and low cost. Engineers and researchers are investigating a variety of interconnect technologies to address these problems, and to enable future high-density, high-performance systems.
One interconnect technology to address these challenges, which is the subject of ongoing research, is optical communication. In principle, optical communication can be used to communicate large amounts of data. However, while photonic technologies based on vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) and optical fibers are typically a convenient and cost-effective solution to communicate modest amounts of data in certain parts of systems (such as between racks and, in certain cases, between boards within a rack), it is often difficult to scale these photonic components to meet the bandwidth, size, and power requirements of input/output (I/O) interfaces for future chips.
Alternatively, optical interconnects or links based on silicon photonics are attractive candidates for interconnect technology because they can be readily scaled on optical integrated circuits. However, it can be difficult to integrate optical integrated circuits with conventional integrated circuits in existing chip packages.
Hence, what is needed is a chip package that does not suffer from the above-described problems.